Listen closely in Kusköy, a mountainous region of northeast Turkey, and you might hear something like this whistled phrase trill across a steep valley. What you hear is not birdsong, but a version of the Turkish language that is whistled instead of spoken, a method that can convey messages across distances of up to 5 kilometers. In kuş dili, or “bird language,” the phrase means “thank you very much” (çok teşekkür ederimin spoken Turkish). Now, a new study shows that the brain processes kuş dili very differently from spoken Turkish, a finding that challenges conventional wisdom about how language works in the brain. The research could also have implications for stroke victims suffering from language loss. 

One of a handful of whistled languages throughout the world, whistled Turkish is still Turkish—it has the same words and the same grammatical structure—but it has a different physical form. A whistle replaces the voice, just as written words replace speech in languages around the world, “but a whistle also imitates essential acoustic cues of the voice,” says bioacoustician and linguist Julien Meyer of France's National Center for Scientific Research in Bron, France, who was not involved in the new study. People who use kuş dili speak ordinary Turkish as well; the whistled version probably arose as a way for villagers to stay in touch when they were far apart.   www.glorybios.com